Rene Descartes Advocated for Baby Steps

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.” — Rene Descartes

The FLYLady talks a lot about making Baby Steps towards buildig routines and cleaning your house. Leo over on Zen Habits writes a lot about baby steps, too. I’m sure you could find many more advocates for baby steps. We were trained to attack project planning this way in my software engineering classes. Yet I’ve had an incredibly hard time applying this philosophy to my personal life. I want it all now. I want to do it all now. I want it perfect. You can imagine what happens…little or nothing. I’m going to focus on making small changes over a period of time as well as being patient with myself. This is also the philosophy behind The Slight Edge, one of my favorite books.

I’ve written about this before on more than one occasion. I guess I keep revisiting it because I have yet to really internalize the principles and make them a way of life.